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Kristin V Stephens-Martinez

Associate Professor of the Practice of Computer Science
Computer Science
308 Research Drive D224, Durham, NC 27708-0129

Overview


Kristin Stephens-Martinez's research lies at the intersection of education and computer science, focusing on using data available in large classrooms. Her focus is on scaling classes, such as how do we add more students to a class without sacrificing quality? She pursues this research by examining data from course tools to find interpretable data-driven insights that inform learning interventions.

She is also the creator and host of The CS-Ed Podcast and writes a blog on teaching.

Office Hours


My office is in LSRC D224. See my class pages' (linked on my website) for this semester's office hours.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Associate Professor of the Practice of Computer Science · 2024 - Present Computer Science, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Computer Science · 2024 - Present Computer Science, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

In the News


Published March 20, 2018
Meet the New Faculty: Kristin Stephens-Martinez Takes a 'Meaning-full' Approach to Data Science

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Recent Publications


Relationships Between Computing Students' Characteristics, Help-Seeking Approaches, and Help-Seeking Behavior in Introductory Courses and Beyond

Conference Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research V.1 · August 3, 2025 Full text Cite

Prior What Experience? The Relationship Between Prior Experience and Student Help-Seeking Beyond CS1

Conference Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Iticse · June 27, 2025 Background and Context. Prior experience (PE) has been shown to be related to computing students' performance, persistence, and help-seeking behavior. However, most works studied prior programming experience in introductory programming (CS1) courses, while ... Full text Cite

Rethinking Computing Students' Help Resource Utilization through Sequentiality

Journal Article ACM Transactions on Computing Education · April 2, 2025 Background. Academic help-seeking benefits students' achievement, but existing literature either studies important factors in students' selection of all help resources via self-reported surveys or studies their help-seeking behavior in one or two separate ... Full text Cite
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Recent Grants


Collaborative Research: Characterizing and empowering student success when traversing the academic help landscape

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by National Science Foundation · 2024 - 2027

IIS: Small: Helping Novices Learn and Debug Relational Queries

ResearchCo-Principal Investigator · Awarded by National Science Foundation · 2020 - 2024

CUE: Collaborative Research: Effective Peer Teaching Across Computing Pathways

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by National Science Foundation · 2020 - 2023

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Education, Training & Certifications


University of California, Berkeley · 2017 Ph.D.
University of California, Berkeley · 2013 M.S.